Vol, Raid boss in U23

I don’t know much about it, I usually stays away from Necro anyways and I haven’t done the raid even once. There are many reasons for it. Like the bad quests with good XP, a terrible flagging system but also a raid with puzzles. I’m not going to start with that again, but those are the main reasons. To me a flagging system should be like the latest raids. Beat a mini boss, flagged. Or do all quest once to flag, done.

The idea to introduce a material grind in order to play a raid is silly but to their benefit stuff like that ended with heroic raids (not counting heroic stuff that was epified like DQ). And hopefully there won’t be anything similar like that here either – like a flagging process involving collecting stuff or a raid with puzzles. I’m quite done with those.

This weekend I ended up hitting a few more levels with my Dragon Singer and I realize right now that I probably need another TR and probably into a human for that extra feat. It’s not doing a good job breaking SR and DC and probably because it relies heavily on AOE or reflex save type spells. Granted, one of the reason is because I’m currently only hitting mid 40’s in Charisma – which is lack of gear and also tomes. But even despite a chunk load of Focus and spell pen I still see a huge amount of reflex saves and evasion and on stuff that makes me really sad (and a reason why epic is so broken right now).
Like a held person that gets a reflex save. Or the Dwarven skellies in Thunderholm that can evade. Stuff like that makes DDO dumb. Because it points to lazy mechanics. How on earth can a held character save against anything? Let alone paralyzed or whatever. It makes no sense. And even if games shouldn’t always make sense it’s hard to argue for the idea that you have slow skellies with superior evasion skills and held monsters evading or saving against damage – damage that is do to direct or AOE hits. How they manage to jump out of the way is beyond me.

This to me points to the mindless CR of monsters. How instead of having a reasonable critter with reasonable abilities, most of it is copy and pasted with a new skin. Like the Drow pirates that just happen to use chains like Shadar Kai. Or the Dwarven skellies that shamble through Thunderholm but jump out of the way like ninjas. And that’s even true with caster types. I get that an assissin type character probably have evasion and or high dex. So it’s natural that they’re trained to jump out of the way. But a caster? So that brings us the the silliness of CR – where so much of the enemy critters get amplified through higher levels to the point that what should be a drawback of a class becomes averagely good. Meaning it’s a caster type – they specialize on offensive and defensive casting. Not on jumping out of the way of incoming magic. But because of the CR inflation what would be a mediocre ability to avoid damage becomes averagely good.

And that’s why so many gravitates to Shiradi casting. Spamming proc’able spells with a good chance for lots of damage is better than building to break DC by maximizing features. It’s easy; it exploits a design and avoid the traps of lazy critter mechanic while lazily spamming a set of multiple shot spells in the process. And why do I know that it’s bad? Because I’m doing things in EN and in normal at level wilderness. I’m not complaining per say, but I can see why people gravitate towards path of least resistance. Because making interesting builds require a much higher investment than to go with the big numbers with less resistance.

Plus another struggle is the 2 elements. A Air Savant, spell singer will generally use 2 type of spells. Sonic and Electric. With fewer spells to choose from you end up with sonic and electric derivatives. The sonic are not bad, but they are fewer because of the fewer levels. Mostly SLA so cheap, but shout and sonic blast followed by the dot is not enough if something is entirely electric immune.

That’s why Shiradi looks so interesting. Because with Shiradi there’s a great chance to proc all type of elements but also big sonic hits (due to the innate sonic procs). Then the otherwise worthless lightning based spells (at least against immune critters) simply become delivery vehicles for diverse procs. So we’ll see, it’s a long way there.